Zen Report: Letting go is hard to do

Lately people have assaulted me with questions about whether they should reconnect with a past love. Though it’s hard to say goodbye to yesterday, sometimes folks need to say zai jian (until we meet again) because land pelted with atomic bombs needs time to become less cancerous — if that’s even possible in this lifetime.

Rather than speak about people’s private pain, humor me with this analogy.

My parents were head over heels about their first home. They spent weeks working on it: painting walls, sanding and then staining hardwood floors. Rocky start but eventually they had a blissful five years.

A tough economy forced Dad to close his toy store. We packed our bags, said farewell to our beloved home and moved to Florida. Our extended family had shops there.

That should’ve been the end of the El Monte love affair, but my parents were nostalgic for their first house. Although Florida was nice, memories of home’s creature comforts haunted them.

The El Monte house went up for sale. People took a look-see; some may have seriously courted the property. My uncle, however, played wingman for my parents. He walked around with some potential buyers and pointed out flaws.

After six months, Mom and Dad re-purchased the house and moved back to El Monte. But things weren’t the same. They couldn’t get the fung shui back to what it was.

Dad served as the public face of the downtown Los Angeles toy store, a business he shared with his siblings. When the shop claimed bankruptcy, a Taiwanese businessman who sold inventory to the store said Dad still owed him money. He found out where Dad lived and hired some Asian gangsters to terrorize my family.

The first time I saw his hired hoodlums was freaking scary. Five guys rang the doorbell; my older brother opened the front door. The monsters barreled into our living room. My brother started swinging, but there wasn’t much he could do. It was five against one. They backed him onto the sofa (thank goodness it wasn’t the floor), and pummeled him for a couple minutes.

The bastards delivered a short message about how we should pay the Taiwanese guy and then they disappeared for a few days. After that, they sat in a white Civic and staked out our house. There were always two or three of them watching our every move.

Home didn’t feel magical anymore. We put cardboard against the street-facing windows so the jerks couldn’t penetrate our private lives.

Dad leased a video store up the street. I walked to the store daily to help him out. One day, one of the bullies rolled his window down and asked me how old I was. I squeaked my age then speed-walked to the video store. I always made sure to walk on the other side of the street after that.

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One weekend we came home to a ransacked backyard. The gangsters had flung our birdcage on the ground, broken fruit tree limbs and dislodged our wooden swing chair. Raw emotion in physical form.

That night my parents told us to pack our bags because we were moving to Hawaii, where Mom’s sister lives. Everyone could pack one small bag. Just about everything but clothes went into the trash. We tore up letters and documents so they wouldn’t know where to find us. I even pulled film containing my time in Oahu out of a video cassette.

We lived in Honolulu for one high school semester. Mom and Dad couldn’t find a job.

The police finally came through. They told the Taiwanese man if anything happened to my family, they would rescind his visa and ship him back to Asia.

When we returned, the front house in El Monte was still up for sale. But Mom and Dad were done with it. They moved into a converted garage with my grandparents. Living with seven people in a studio where the bathroom doubled as a kitchen wasn’t an ideal living arrangement. Yet it was just an uncomfortable transition period. Mom and Dad eventually found a new home to fall in love with, and they’re still there.

So is reconnection possible? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Zen Vuong is a staff writer for the Pasadena Star-News. She’s searching for a place she could call home. You can follow Zen at Twitter.com/ZenReport or on Facebook.com/ZenReport.